It is rather remarkable to note how easy it is to cultivate the
friendship of birds, even birds that are ordinarily quite wild. When I
used to go to my office in the early morning, I always scattered a few
handfuls of grits around the back window that I might accommodate some
of my special friends to a breakfast, and it required only a short time
for me to win the confidence of so many birds that I had to limit them
to quite a short breakfast. At first no blackbirds came near me or my
place of business. Soon they would sit on nearby trees and return to the
grounds immediately after I returned from the yard back into the house.
I had among my daily visitors not less than three or four hundred of
these welcome friends. They would play around in the yard very amusingly
and pick at each other much like children and afforded me much amusement
and many pleasant moments in the course of a week.
Blackbirds have very little music in them or rather get very little out
of themselves. John Burroughs has this to say of their music: "Their
voices always sound as if they were laboring under a severe attack of
influenza, though a large flock of them heard at a distance on a bright
afternoon of early spring produce an effect not unpleasing. The air is
filled with crackling, splintering, spurting semi-musical sounds, which
are like pepper and salt to the ear." I really enjoy the mingled sounds
produced by a great congregation of them, and often follow a flock of
them down the creek side to their favorite resting place, just to hear
them. They are always in great flocks here during the winter, and
sometimes when feeding along on a hillside, the rear ranks marching over
the bulk to the front in rapid succession, present an appearance
somewhat like heavy waves of the sea, and one a short distance looks on
with admiration and even surprise, to see such symmetry and uniformity
in their movement.
One cannot fail to appreciate how much good a great flock of them do in
a day as they move across a field covered with noxious grass and weed
seeds. They seem to form an army in order to co-operate with man in
every possible way to balance up the powers of nature. Weeds prevent
crops from growing. Every seed that germinates in the soil and is
allowed to grow, if only for a short while, tends to exhaust the soil.
If the birds get these seeds in winter before germination begins, the
useful plants will have a much larger fund of food from which to draw.
Once in a while our blackbirds get a little grain and the farmer
condemns them and looks upon them only with a murderer's eye. The birds
do a hundred times more good than evil, and should not be condemned on
such slight provocation. Their hard fare during the winter makes them
rush into the fields sometimes in spring and get a taste of grains
useful to man, but surely they should be pitied rather than censured,
and so long as I can get them to depend on me for help, I am going to
put out a mite for their breakfast. With sorrow I bid them good-bye each
spring, but with renewed delight I hail with joy their return in autumn
with their young.